ANCIENT CINEMA is a multi-media exhibition by Henry Jesionka that premiered at the Donat in Zadar, Croatia in July 2012. The exhibition features artifacts from a fictional ancient cinema along with historical evidence to support the possibility that the Greeks and Romans could have invented cinema two thousand years ago.     

Most historians trace the history of cinema to the early 19th century, with the invention of the Phenakistoscope, in 1832, and the Zoetrope, two years later. Henry Jesionka’s “Ancient Cinema” presents speculative evidence from an extraordinary archaeological discovery in Zadar, Croatia, that may set the history of cinema back almost two thousand years. The collection of metal and glass objects featured in “Ancient Cinema”...

An unusual Roman bronze artifact, recently purchased at a flea market in Zadar, Croatia, was the first in a series of archaeological findings that lead to the discovery of a Roman “film” projector from the first century AD.

  “There are major scholarly issues still unresolved about Roman glassware,” writes Stuart J. Fleming in his study of Early Imperial Roman Glass, "not the least where any particular piece was made. Glass vessels, like many other goods, moved effortlessly throughout the sprawling Roman trade network.”

The bronze coins featured in “Ancient Cinema,” were discovered in 2011 in Nin, Croatia. They include Latin text, but no date or denomination.Coins from the late Roman Republic (250 BC - 27 BC) were sometimes produced in bronze, emulating coins of Greek colonies in southern Italy. Coins from this period often included mythological subjects, although from 44 BC - 27 BC, Roman coins...